At Jacobin David Sirota complains that President Biden and the Democrats are driving Americans nuts:
Right after being sworn in, he signed an American Rescue Plan that rejected President Barack Obama’s top-down bailouts for bankers, and rightly provided direct economic aid to millions of non-rich people. As poverty subsequently dropped, Biden’s poll numbers temporarily skyrocketed, seemingly halting the ascent of Republicans’ authoritarian mob.
But now less than seven months before the midterm elections, things have stalled, and Biden seems intent on accelerating — rather than combating — a rising tide of disillusionment.
Tossing the GOP a lifeline, he has reverted to his familiar formula that some warned about during the Democratic presidential primaries: amid intensifying crises, he promises big changes that could help the working class — and then prevents those changes from actually happening.
It’s occurred over and over again:
He speechifies about the need to address crises he then makes worse.
He blames Congress for gridlock but won’t pressure lawmakers or use his executive authority to do things.
He promises policy reforms that his own agencies decline to implement.
The baiting and switching is a feature, not a bug — a deliberate strategy predicated on a corporate media ecosystem that ignores the gap between White House rhetoric and action.
Ensconced in a bubble of blue-wave emojis, Team Blue hashtags, and genuflecting punditry, Biden and his staff likely assume they can rhetorically placate voters and yet enrich the Biden campaign donors crushing those voters — and they expect nobody will catch on to the ruse. They appear to assume that as a pile of unsigned executive orders sit in the Oval Office, voters will believe his media loyalists’ claims that “there’s just not much President Joe Biden can do†about anything.
I take it his complaint is that President Biden has not delivered the progressive wish list rather than that the wish list is unwise or outside the president’s ability to deliver and that he thinks President Biden’s approval rating would soar were he to deliver more of them. Maybe. Or it might collapse even farther, taking the re-election prospects of Democrats who don’t hail from progressive districts along with them.
It all reminds me of Bismarck’s famous aphorism—politics is the art of the possible. There’s more than just this year at stake. It might be possible to accomplish more of that wish list this year only to have the actions cancelled or even reversed next year. The Biden Administration’s track record in the courts has been fairly weak. Abuse of power doesn’t seem to me like good advice.
Why doesn’t the president pressure lawmakers more? To do what? Commit seppuku? How will that strengthen the president’s position in the next term?
I don’t envy the president—he’s getting it from left and right.
